THE STORY OF THE GUY FROM KATHIAWAD: Part 1

Karan Sinh Jhala is from Kathiawad. Kathiawad is the peninsular part of Gujarat in India.

At least his parents were Kathiawadi. He was born in Durgapur in Bengal. He was the youngest in a family of four. Two elder sisters and an elder brother.

His father Teshar Sinh Jhala hailed from Fangpar, a village near Morbi. His father and grandfather never tilled their ancestral lands. They both worked in the princely states of Saurashtra.

His grandfather worked in one of the many small princely states of Saurashtra. Saurashtra in Gujarati means 'a hundred states'.'Sau' means hundred. 'Rashtra' means nation.

Teshar's grandfather was a rather stupid man. He had much land before the independence of India. But he did not understand that he would lose half of it because of land reforms initiated after the country became free. The new laws said that the tiller of the land would get to be the owner of half the land he tilled for the real owners. Teshar's grandfather used to say that the man who tilled his farms was like his son. How could a son go against his father? But the 'son' quietly gave an application in the local government office and from a landless labourer he became a land owner.

Karan's maternal grandfather, Firubha, was a cleverer man. He lived in Fithad village in a nearby district and had educated baniyas as his friends who warned him of the upcoming land reforms. So Firubha quickly divided his large farmlands of four hundred bighas into four parts and named his three sons as owners of three parts. Thus Firubha escaped the land redistribution law and managed to hold on to his large farms.